WELCOME !

It is with great pleasure that we invite you to
The 6th Franco-Irish Literary Festival
on the theme “Future Tenses / Futurs Imparfaits”

The 6th Franco-Irish Literary Festival, organised by the Alliance Française Dublin and the Cultural Service of the French Embassy, in partnership with the Arts Council, Ireland Fund of France, Ireland Literature Exchange, the Irish Writers’ Centre, and Poetry Ireland, is this year being supported by Foras na Gaeilge - the body responsible for promoting Irish language and culture.

This co-operation is a mark of the important place that this Festival has always held for writers in the Irish language. That is one of its principal qualities, namely: opening up Franco-Irish literary exchanges, not only to the entire wealth of bilingualism in Ireland, but also to the multicultural dimension of the Francophone world and to the contribution of other European literatures.

The objective of the Festival has always been to suggest that our guest writers and our public focus their discussions around ambitious topics. After “Ecrire l’Europe, Writing Europe” (2003) and “La mémoire aujourd’hui, Memory Now” (2004), it is an uncertain future, fraught with tension and feared as imperfect, in the topic: “Future Tenses”, that we are asking our guests to face in their contributions, as they have already done through their writing.

In the post 1989 and 9/11 world, what has succeeded the clear cut Post War breaks, the clashes of the superpowers at the time of the Cold War are grumbling conflicts, internal schisms, guerrilla warfare and civil wars whose fracture lines are blurred and challenges unclear.

The literature of the second half of the twentieth century seemed sure of the challenges to be taken up in a world of sharply defined divisions, where clashes would relate to responses to clearly delineated issues. Now, while ideologies have lost their certainties, it is the very questions, and not the answers that cause the problem. What future should be proposed, what values claimed, when not only crimes against humanity, terrorism, but also social violence and individuals torn apart, are the daily bread from our media and seem to be the inevitable format of our existence? It is in such a world, that the task of writing and of its servants must be appraised.

While taking on the risk that any art form holds, of deflecting us away from reality and becoming thereby, mere entertainment, the writer nowadays, more so than ever before must, page after page, line after line, give ever renewed proof that writing is the only path to come close to the reality of these “Futurs imparfaits”. But this writing is itself being renewed, and this is an exciting topic that will cut across the discussions. Current globalisation of the world seems to correspond to a globalisation of literary genres: fiction, auto-fiction, diaries, notes, documentaries, and news reports are merging, interpenetrating to create the memory of the real world.

So, literature is now intent on being engagée, intent on taking new paths, intent on allowing the writer to show up the interconnections, which will allow the elective affinities of the network to replace the Manichaean divisions of globalisation, in order to thus counter the imperfection of l’à-venir.

But our Festival remains primarily a celebration of literature, and it is therefore to a plenitude of hope, optimism, and talent that we invite you !

Finally, we would like to express our warmest thanks to our sponsors and patrons without whom a festival of this size would never have been possible.

We look forward to seeing you from 15^th to 17^th of April 2005 !

Jean-Michel Garcia
Director
Alliance Française in Dublin